Blair Bunting Show Us How to Light a Football Player

Being an established advertising photographer and a Nikon and Maurice Lacroix Ambassador, Blair Bunting sure knows how to light. In a recent blog post, titled How to Light a Football Player, Blair shares some of that knowledge.

“Let’s talk about lighting, specifically for mood,” writes Blair on his blog. “The eye finds discomfort and intimidation in the unknown and the unknown is where the light is not. The approach to making a subject intimidating should not be a mass of lights cranked to 11, but a single focus of direction where one light dominates and the remaining support the fear. An example of this that I shot a while back is this portrait of a football player.”

“Here is the RAW image from the shot to show where we take it on set before it goes into good ole Photoshop,” he writes. “And the lighting scheme: (notice that the powers of the support lights never go above the singular direction of the key, if we broke that rule, the eye would become comfortable).”

Regarding the Pro-8, Blair writes:

“As with the need for consistent sensor performance is the need for consistent lights. For campaigns, I trust Pro-8’s with my livelihood. The power is always sufficient to close down and delivery is quick enough to avoid blur. From there the rest comes down to build, reliability and standards that make it easy for me to tell an assistant what is needed, even when they speak a different language.”